May 4, 2011

The world is travelling at the speed of light and we are trying to hang on just a moment longer to live in the now which has already passed. We are attempting to digest a mind numbing amount of content. The Harvard Business Review published a piece dealing with the age old interview question: “Where will you be in five years?”

How About Five Minutes?

Depending on the circles you travel, you can feel completely out of sync with your clientele while it seems your competitors are cashing in. I’m asked all the time if YouIntegrate can help. The first step is to find out what you want to do with these digital channels and how you feel it can help you find your audience.

It is easy to create a profile. It is much more difficult to populate it with content that serves both your customers and your business. And it's even more challenging to have the patience for the time it takes to grow the community. After that you need to tend to its health and longevity. Campaign mentality will not create long-term growth.

You can spend a lot of time and money on messaging and media choices to see very little result. Or you can strike gold and then try and replicated it which is rare. The social web is a warm inviting temptress that can woo us into thinking we’re getting somewhere in short order. But there are no quick wins.

Easy Peasey

It is simple to go online, find a place to land and start barking. It is much more difficult to develop strong B2B or B2C relationships through the social web. This stuff takes time. If you look at how you built your business so far, it is the same process.

Mitch Joel wrote this week about the Mutterings of Twitter. He explained that we can easily pull out our smartphone at the check-in counter the moment our flight is delayed and send out an angry tweet or Facebook status update. The real-time web has given us the ability to publish material for free in an instant. The key is for companies to be with their customers all along so responses to service issues can be addressed. If they aren't there, they can't set the record straight.

Our Need to Connect

The only prediction we can make is that this will only get more challenging. We are not making less mobile devices, we are not shrinking the online world and the ability to grow a personal network is not diminishing.

But what you can do as a manager or owner is find your voice no matter the platform. Yes I can help. Then you can discover the power of sharing it no matter where your audience resides.